Tony Liu, [18/12/2024 5:35 PM]

Filecoin GTM model lessons:

Overall, the success of filecoin could be roughly outlined as: Filecoin high-profile PR & 200M+ funding amount + Decentralized AWS narrative —— Miners have high price expectation for Filecoin —- participated very actively —- Filecoin never reset the testnet metrics —- very big wealth effect to early contributors —— Miners in China are incentivized to sub-sale 分销 to retails to get more token to stake (hence more mining rewards) & higher staking window, low emission award leads to little selling pressure —- Multilevel community-driven marketing scheme in China to bootstrap the supply side.

Ultimately, the key to bootstrap supply side boils down to miners having high price expectation.

Secondary reasons include 1) Filecoin’s high node requirement (the whole setup including staking amounts to around 500K-$1m at that point) incentivizes miners to market to retails for them to contribute their liquidity so that miners could mine more rewards and retails also have incentive to participate because of the high barrier of entry; 2) Filecoin’s tokenomics: long staking window (think around 500 days before the staked token becomes unlocked) and low emssion (20% of the mining reward unlock instantly and rest linearly vesting) leads to low sell pressure. The confluence of these factors leads to a community-driven, multi-level marketing scheme (Filecoin/Protocol Lab actually never approached to miners, the miners go to them).

GTM Strategy:

Strategic focus:

• branding & mindshare top priority & focusing on bootstrapping demand side (project/developer building & using Irys) over supply side (node operator bootstrapping).
  • As shown in the example of Filecoin (Protocol Lab never reach out to miners/bootstrap the supply side), once you have the branding & mindshare as a signal for high price expectation, everything else is just downstream from there, the supply side will just come to you.

Marketing & Mindshare Strategy (ties closely to ecosystem building/demand-side):

Tony Liu, [18/12/2024 5:35 PM]

• Goal is to let IQ50 (retail) and IQ150 (developers and other more sophisticated thinkers) both discuss about you. The priority should be IQ150 (because retails generally follow IQ150), and then just use analogy/comp to appeal to IQ50.

• Agenda: Stress how Irys is the best of both Filecoin and Arweave that it has both permanent & transient storage functionality. On top of that, Irys brings programmability of data that Filecoin & Arweave were not able to. Because of these functionalities, Irys becomes the home of DePIN, esp data-heavy DePIN projects.

• Actionables & recommendations:

  The overall impression from Irys’s twitter is that it conveys a clear message that “Irys is the first programmable data chain”, the emphasis now is to add context to that vision/message by explaining: 1) its differences with substitutive ecosystem (e.g., filecoin and arweave), and 2) what kind of differentiated application could be built on Irys.

  • The most effective way to build the branding of Irys is to establish partnership or co-marketing with complementary high-profile project**s. The priority there should be: 1) **Web2 giants who has incentive to use crypto-economic to bootstrap some sort of their data supply chain, and 2) high-profile Web3 companies like NFT community (pudgy penguin, BeraChain, and other hot Depin project (see below)
  • Event-driven strategy that could showcase Irys’s difference with substitutive ecosystem (Filecoin, arweave)
    • Get on podcast with substitutive ecosystem project to debate about the differences, just like the Monad vs MegaETH podcast
  • Create memes that shows the difference between a pure data storage chain and a programmable data chain.
  • Increase Irys’s exposure in real-life crypto events. This could include co-hosting crypto social event to create “social vibe” with Berachain, developer activities events like hackerhouse with DePIN theme or day-long events like MegaZu
  • write articles (like request for projects) or videos to show how projects in the hottest narrative of DePIN could be better built on Irys to tap into the narrative of DePIN. Additionally, could also do partnership with those projects on top of that.
    • AI related data narrative:
      • Private data for AI training: basically how LLM companies have exhausted the use of public data for model training so that private/gated data is the next go-to
        • Project: Grass
      • Decentralized data labeling (Web3 version of ScaleAI)
        • Project: Sahara
      • data that could be used for comparing/benchmarking different LLM models
        • Project: LayerLens
    • Egocentric data & Robotics: how to use Irys to boostrap quality egocentric data for general-purpose robotics training
    • Logevity/health data & crypto: there is increased demand for health diagnostics, quantified self devices, and a more sophisticated understanding of biomarkers + therapeutics for longevity. The current issue for training next-generation models is the lack of accessible, high-quality health data.
      • projects like: HairDAO (for other health verticals), The Enhanced Games, NetMind Life, Superpower, Function Health, MoleculeDAO, VitaDAO
    • Decentralized Energy narrative
      • hottest project: DayLight
    • Old projects with high mindshare: Helium, Mobile, etc.
    • Decentralized compute narrative
      • hot project include Akash, Render, IoNet, etc.
  • Expand Irys’s audiences to beyond the english crypto community by setting up localized social media accounts like Irys Chinese community, korean community, etc.

Supply-side strategy

Tony Liu, [18/12/2024 5:35 PM] Although supply-side is relatively low-hanging fruit compared to building the ecosystem, it is still important to bootstrap some nodes for the network to work:

• Relies on private channel since the distribution of mining companies is more decentralized than in the Filecoin era, could use the protocol lab connection to connect to big miners
• Currently miners are mostly mining SpaceMesh, SpaceMesh appeal to miners because 1)protocol lab BD resources, 2) its cheap & friendly for filecoin miners to setup: similar hardware requirement to Filecoin & technical UX for setting up very easy & no stake requirement for mining (use proof of space time instead of PoS)
• Tokenomics analysis related to supply-chain bootstrapping:
  • there needs to be some staking amount & unlock time window to alleviate the selling pressure so that the token could create wealth effect. The specifics of the staking amount & unlocking time window should be set according to how successful the mindshare/narrative marketing strategy is (so that miner has high price expectation to the future of the token).

Although supply-side is relatively low-hanging fruit compared to building the ecosystem, it is still important to bootstrap some nodes for the network to work: